Times Pie: How to Bottle Homemade Vanilla Extract

Baby Extract (Left) and Extract ready for bottling (Right)

As you can see above, the bottle on the right is ready for bottling – it’s dark and smells strongly of vanilla (just trust me on this)!

Tools/Supplies:

- 6 month old vanilla extract (see How to Make Homemade Vanilla Extract)

- Glass bottles and caps (I buy mine online in 4 oz versions- 2 oz bottles are better if you don’t use a ton of extract)

- Funnel (I have a multi-size one, and use the small section for bottling and the large section for filtering)

- Coffee Filters

- Glasses (for filtering extract)

- Optional – Bowl with spout (makes funneling easier)

Time Commitment:

~ 0.5- 1 hr, plus time to wash and dry bottles

How to Make it Happen:

1) Start by gathering your tools/supplies – I wash and dry my bottles and caps thoroughly, but you can also sanitize them if you wish. A 750 ml bottle of extract (minus some because space was needed for the vanilla beans) fills about six 4 ounce bottles.

Step 1 - Adventures in Bottle-washing

Step 1 (more stuff) - Assemble Team

2) Put a coffee filter in your funnel and place it over a glass. Pour the extract slowly into the filter, giving it time to drip through. This will get rid of the little vanilla bean shards - it also gets rid of the seeds, so if you want to keep them, use cheesecloth instead of a coffee filter.

Step 2 - Filtering

3) I like to use two glasses so I can bottle extract while more is filtering.

Step 3 - Tag Team Filtering

4) A bowl with a spout helps make bottling easier, but it’s not strictly necessary.

Step 4 - Looks gross, but trust me, it smells amazing!

5) Place your funnel into a bottle and slowly pour the extract – make sure not to overfill the bottle or your kitchen will smell like vanilla for weeks!

Step 5 - Filling Bottles

6) After about half the bottle, I change the coffee filter. By this point it will have small bean pieces and lots of seeds stuck in it, and a fresh filter helps the process go faster. To change it, simply gather the edges of the filter and pull them together, twisting it into a little package. Gently squeeze the rest of the extract out of the filter, being careful not to put a hole in the filter (or you’ll get seeds and vanilla bean pieces in your extract).